Chapter 7 #2
Not embarrassingly. He was too good a singer to be embarrassing.
But the song was not his and it did not fit in his mouth, and Jenna heard every place where he took the easy interval instead of the hard one, and the bridge — the bridge he had never once in his life been able to get to — he sang under the melody and then stopped and started the line again.
Two thousand people watched a man be worse at something than his wife.
He got to the end. He said, "That's hers too. She never let me cut it." Which was not true, and Jenna's whole chest went white-hot at the lie for about a second and a half before she understood what he was doing.
He was covering for her. He was standing up there taking one more piece of it so that nobody in that room would ever be able to say she wrote it about him and gave it away.
He said, "Merry Christmas," and the band came back in on the next song, and that was the end of it.
She got out before the lights came up, the way Jill told her to.
That part she did right. Coat closed, head down, side stairs, out.
What she got wrong was the twenty seconds on the landing between the second and third flights, where it was warm from the crowd below and her hands were shaking and she stopped and opened the coat and leaned against the wall to breathe.
There was a man on the flight below with a camera, and he was not there for her, and he took nine frames of a woman on a stairwell in about four seconds because that is what those men are paid to do.
She did not notice. She closed the coat and went down and out into the cold and got in her truck on Rankin Avenue and sat there for a while.
She was furious. She wanted to be clear about that, then and afterward.
She was furious in a way that had a physical location, a hot band across her shoulders, because he had put her in that room and made her hear it in front of two thousand people and a camera crew, and had not asked, and had never once in twenty years asked.
And underneath the fury, at a depth she did not have a name for, was the other thing.
He put the guitar down.
She sat with her hands on the wheel and made herself be accurate about it, because that was still the only thing she had that was entirely hers.
He had not apologized. He had not asked for anything. He had not said the word sorry or the word forgive or her name, once, in twelve minutes.
He had just stood up in the only room in the world where those people had known him at twenty-five, and told them he was not what they thought, and then proved it by playing her song worse than she would have.
That cost him something no filing could cost him. She knew exactly what it cost, because she had been standing in the wings for two decades watching him build it.
"Damn you," Jenna said, out loud, to nobody, in a truck, on Rankin Avenue.
Then she drove home.
Jill called at midnight and did not start with I told you so, which was how Jenna knew it had been bad from the outside too.
"Are you sitting down."
"I'm lying down."
"It's already up. All of it. Somebody in the third row filmed the whole twelve minutes on a phone and it's got two million on it and it's one in the morning." A long breath. "Jenna, I have to say the thing."
"Say it."
"That was the best thing I have ever seen a man do and I still don't trust it."
"Both of those are true."
"They are and I hate it." Paper, a lighter, Jill smoking in a kitchen four hundred miles away.
"Here's what happens tomorrow. Tomorrow every person in America decides what your marriage is, and about a third of them decide you're a saint and a third decide you're taking him for everything and the last third decide it's a stunt. And none of them were in the room."
"I was in the room."
"You were." Jill's voice changed. "Was he telling the truth?"
Jenna lay on a mattress on the floor and looked at the water stain shaped like Kentucky.
"Every word," she said. "Except the last thing, and he lied about that to protect me."
Jill didn't answer for a while.
"Well, hell," she said.
Micah called at half past twelve from the loading dock, and she could hear the crew breaking down the stage behind him.
"You get out okay?"
"I got out."
"He asked me before we went on. If you'd come."
Jenna closed her eyes.
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him no."
"Micah — "
"You didn't tell me I could tell him, Jenna, so I didn't tell him.
" Something metal went over on concrete somewhere and he swore at it.
"He didn't ask again. He just said 'okay' and went and sat in the van by himself for forty minutes and then he drove home.
Hal's been on the phone since ten. There's a — there's some kind of thing going on with the label. "
"What kind of thing?"
"I don't know. Above my pay grade. I hit things for a living." A pause. "Jenna. He didn't tell anybody. Not me, not Hal, not the network. He wrote that list out in the dressing room on the back of a set list about twenty minutes before we went on."
She sat up in the dark.
"The list was handwritten?"
"Yeah."
A hundred and nine songs, by record, by year, from memory, in a dressing room, in twenty minutes.
He had known them all. He had known every one of them, in order, without looking anything up, because for twenty years he had been carrying them around in his mouth.
"Okay," she said. "Thank you, Micah."
"Merry Christmas, Jenna."
She lay awake until the light came up and did not write a word, which had not happened to her in a decade.
There were two things she did not know that night.
The first was on a photo desk by ten that evening — a woman on a stairwell in the warm light of the second landing, coat open, one hand flat and low, absolutely unmistakable, in nine frames.
The second happened in a hotel in Nashville at about the same hour, when a man named Vic Sandell at Marbury Records watched a live feed of an artist telling a television audience that he had not written a song in fifteen years, and did the only arithmetic a label president knows how to do, and made a phone call.
By midnight Sadie Kaye had no deal.
She was twenty-seven years old, she was the only person in the entire story who had not lied to anybody, and nobody called to tell her why.